The BBC News article Climate change: Oceans 'soaking up more heat than estimated' mentions Argo floats as one technology to measure the temperature of the oceans, and links to argo.ucsd.edu where there is the map below that looks surprisingly uniform.
I had thought that an initial distribution of floating objects would, over the course of years, end up clumpy and gyre-bound. Is there something that is actively managing this uniformity, or at least passively maintaining it?
From the UCSD link:
What is Argo?
Argo is a global array of 3,800 free-drifting profiling floats that measures thetemperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. This allows, for the first time, continuous monitoring of the temperature, salinity, and velocity of the upper ocean, with all data being relayed and made publicly available within hours after collection.
Positions of the floats that have delivered data within the last 30 days :